Amtrak offering employee buyoutsPublished: November 1, 2011
WASHINGTON – Amtrak announced to employees yesterday that it would be offering buyouts to employees not covered by labor agreements. In a special employee advisory, Amtrak said starting next week it would be offering non-agreement employees a Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment in order “to better allocate its resources and align the structure of the company in accordance with its Strategic Plan and within the financial realities it faces.”
Employees not covered by labor contracts and with at least one year of service may elect to participate in the plan, starting Nov. 7 and lasting through Nov. 25. Amtrak said by offering the voluntary plan now, it would be a way to reduce the impact of future involuntary separations. If cost reduction and organizational expectations are not achieved, Amtrak said it will implement an involuntary reduction in the number of employees beginning in January 2012.
Amtrak is facing the possibility of severe cuts as it appears the Federal government will significantly reduce the amount of funding it will receive in the next fiscal year.
I’m not an Amtrak employee, but taking a buyout package depends pretty much on what’s being offered. Since this buyout seems to be aimed at various management personnel, I would assume that early retirement may be part of the package for some.
They’re not specifically targeting Amtrak. I’m a contractor, not a federal employee myself, but I hear lots and lots of stuff where I work. Not going to say where because I don’t know what I can and can’t repeat. But this is kind of across the board. They’re offering early retirements to a lot of the older employees so they can ease back on the hiring freeze and pull in younger people.
The people between the older and younger. Or they don’t need to learn.
I’m not being railroad specific here, but a lot of what the old people would teach is stuff that doesn’t need to be taught or shouldn’t be passed on. Like I do a lot of document production and the older hands don’t understand or are unwilling to learn that we’ve shifted to electronic documents and not print documents. This makes submittals for imagery and graphics very, very different. Younger employees know that colors isn’t important because its not getting printed and its not going to cost more. The older employees submit grayscale pie charts that you can’t read. Things like that.
Well, yeah if we are just concerned with how the documents and pie charts look like, then I guess they don’t need to learn.
It’s the part about what goes on those documents and pie charts…
Even on my little old freight hauler, there is a lot of anticipation (may not be the right word) about what the railroad is going to look like when it suddenly loses decades of experience. No training in the world can replace that. IMHO, of course. But then again, I learned a lot about my job from those that trained with old heads (many of which retired before I got there), and try my best to pass that down. But there’s still a lot I’m sure gets lost as it is passed down from “generation” to “generation”.
You realize this is incredibly insulting, don’t you?
Sometimes you have to clean house. Just because someone has a lot of experience doesn’t mean their experience is actually useful. You get locked into “this is how we always did it.” Well sometimes that doesn’t work any more and that experience is worthless.
There are people fighting to defend their already dead projects and programs because its what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years. Heck, I wasn’t even alive when you started it. But its time for it to go and people like me don’t care about something from 1978. We’re, in a way, more objective about stuff because we don’t have entire careers and lives wrapped up in things.
Your post is just as insulting (if not more so), sir.
If I had a dime for every wet behind the ears new guy I’ve seen here at work that was going “to change the world with a new style of thinking”, and ultimately failed, I’d have a couple of bucks by now.
I truly believe it takes both styles of thinking (old school and new style) working together to get the best results. I’m not the oldest guy on here, but even I wouldn’t dismiss an idea just because it isn’t “new”.
Today’s rules don’t let me pass down a lot of things down, but that don’t stop me. Problem is, too many kids today don’t want to listen, and it shows. They usually are the ones who get in trouble all the time.
Zuggy and I don’t agree often, but I agree with him 100% here. Might work for the screwed-up mess that is transit and toy trains/light rail. Doesn’t work with legitimate railroads as Zug correctly points out.
From an engineering maintenance & design standpoint, the brain drain is VERY real and lack of a" training pipeline" creates problems, some of which are dramatic failures caused by inability to understand the past.
Your experience, and the realilty of railroading are two different worlds.
Operations wise, some things cannot change. I am locked into “this is how we always did it” because no matter what hairbrained idea that has come down the pike, it always seems we end up reverting to past practices. And horrors, they actually work.
Change is good, when change is needed.
“ We’re, in a way, more objective about stuff because we don’t have entire careers and lives wrapped up in things.”
Actually, I bet you will end up making the same mistakes as in 1978, 1982, 1995, and so forth because you cannot remember that what you propose has been tried, and failed. I wish I had a dollar for every young tyke that walked in and wanted to change the face of railroading.
I’m not a railroader. I’m a lumber salesman. But I find your perspective to be way out there. It’s probably just the realization that I’m probably one generation older than you. Over the last 30 years, I’ve gone from being the new guy to being the old hand.
For the most part, success comes with experience. In my industry, we see a lot of big companies buying out older companies. Standard M.O. is to then fire everybody that’s been there a while and replace them with new, younger workers who will work for half the price. The comapanies them struggle, because they can’t find out why the new guys can’t produce like the old guys. Chaulk that up to experience, I guess. I imagine railroading has similarities, even if the printing(?) business doesn’t.
Longevity brings ownership. It is quite a natural behavior in human nature. Oh woe is what we have breed today in the name of short term profits and headcount. We now invest more in mechanical machines than humans And care for them better than the humans.
Yes, a lot of younger guys will work for half the price, but I assure you, not perform half as well. Not a guess, but thirty five years of observation. Speaking of which, as yourself why in 2011, there are more career men in Railroading, than most other industries? How come there are 45 year men and woman? Pay, plus retirement, plus benefits is one strong point.
And guess what has happened to them in other industries? In some cases, non-existant. People end up wandering from job to job seeking something to latch onto. I made the decision in 1994, after my former employer gutted it’s pension system.¹ Those years shot to heck. I had nothing left in my hand but Social Security (and vivid memories of Dad trying to survive on it). A fine how-do-you-do! Really, who would give much loyalty to such a system? That is how I ended up on the railroad.
I’m an analyst at federal agency. I feel a little weird picking out the graphics thing but that was all the griping in the office on thursday and friday in the office.
Most of what I do is performance analysis. The methodology, requirements, procedures, reporting, all of that has changed in the last 10 years. Decades of accrued experience in the old ways is absolutely worthless. And a lot of people have struggles transitioning. Its, sometimes, smarter to offer those people an early exit and bring in new people that only lived in a world where the all-electronic stuff was the only way.
I wouldn’t be making the same arguments for, say, an airline pilot. That has changed but is fundamentally the same.
That may be fine in government work, but it has no application in Railroading. Especially to those of us who actually do the work. Yeah we got newfangled computar machines and AEI readers, but all that has done is made a lot of trainmen lazy. Gone are the days where a good switchman could look at a car, and have a good probability of knowing where it goes (and can tell the difference between a sugar car and grain car on sight alone).
That’s why we need old heads. That’s why you don’t toss their experience by the way because some young chap wants a job, or his seniority.
While certain industries often do benefit from keeping more younger people in (mainly fast-changing ones, like technology), many industries, like railroading, would likely not benefit from this. While things may change on the railroads, it still takes a lot of labor and know-how to get the stuff done, and this is one of those industries that you really don’t want to overdo it. For the most part, anytime you have these wave changes happening, like massive cutting of older employees, you’re going to lose out on a lot of know-how that you’re not going to get back. People will be fumbling around a good bit, just as they did in the beginning, when plenty of know-how to avoid this situation was already present.
Ideally, as older employees are gradually phased out, new ones will be gradually phased in. A system like that can continue to update and stay current, without any real downsides. This is how it should be for the most part. In railroading, the older people have likely stayed relatively up to date, so what they have to teach would still be very valuable to any new guy. Remember, they’ve been doing things for so long. They know what works, what doesn’t, and what new ideas involving new abilities may or may not be likely to succeed, and why, and they can point that out, so people can make informed decisions.
NittanyLion, especially in railroading, if you were to go up against some old guy’s methods for doing a day’s work, he’d be done way before you would be, and he’d spend the rest of his time standing around laughing at you, watching you creep through your duties, and if you don’t believe me, I’m sure plenty of guys here would accept such a challenge. Young people are physically able, but lack experience and knowledge. Old people are the opposite. Good workplaces have both, and account for the advantages and disadvantages of both. Besides, you need old guys who know what rounds the yard bulls make, so they can sneak you on